Posted on 02/03/2003 6:26:19 PM PST by chance33_98
DOD official: Army budget plan falls short
By Lisa Burgess, Stars and Stripes European edition, Monday, February 3, 2003
ARLINGTON, Va. — The Army has a dilemma with the Bush administration’s 2004 budget submission to Congress: America is at war, but the $93.9 billion Army budget request looks the same as it would have if Sept. 11, 2001, had never happened and Saddam Hussein had never defied the United Nations.
“This is a peacetime budget, but we are at the same time at war, and perhaps facing a bigger war,” a Defense Department spokesman told Pentagon reporters Friday. “There is not the money to do what we’re doing in Afghanistan, and should anything else come up on the neon light sign, we don’t have the money to do that, either.”
What that means, the official said, is that the proposed $3 billion increase over the $93.9 billion Congress gave the Army in 2003 does not cover any deployments under way for Afghanistan, not to mention the buildup in the Persian Gulf.
The budget also doesn’t have money to pay for the extra 8,000 soldiers that the Army will have on the books by the end of fiscal 2003 in October.
Congress has limited funds to a total of 480,000 active-duty soldiers, but the service will have 488,000.
To keep paychecks coming, the Army officials are counting on the Defense Department to go to Congress later this year to ask for a “supplemental” war allocation to the regular budget.
But that isn’t guaranteed. Last year, DOD asked for an extra $20 billion to cover the war on terror, including Afghanistan, but has received just $7 billion.
The end-strength overflow is just one of the risks Army officials said they had to take in the 2004 budget proposal to make sure the Army’s modernization effort stays on track, even though the Army’s overall share of the defense budget — 24.6 percent — did not change from last year, the official said.
Much of the $3 billion increase over 2003 is taken up by fixed costs beyond the Army’s control, such as $900 million in inflation costs and the Bush administration’s proposed pay raise, which would cost the Army another $900 million.
The pay raise would average 4.1 percent but be handled differently in 2004 for all military personnel. Instead of an across-the-board raise, raises will range from 2 percent for entry-level soldiers and officers, to 6.5 percent for midgrade and senior NCOs and warrant officers.
Another DOD-wide plan the Army has to fund is the decrease in out-of-pocket housing expenses, which would drop to 3.5 percent in 2004, down from 7.5 percent in 2003.
Overall, personnel costs — which account for about 40 percent of the Army’s budget — are scheduled to increase in 2004 to $37.4 billion, up from $35.3 billion in 2003.
The Army’s construction budget request is $200 million less than 2003: $1.8 billion, including $776 million for barracks, gyms and dining facilities.
The Army had asked for $1.6 billion in 2003, but Congress added $400 million.
The 2004 family housing budget is $1.4 billion, compared with $1.3 billion in the 2003 allocation from Congress.
The 2004 budget has money to upgrade 8,400 army family housing units worldwide, or 7 percent of the 125,000 units the service maintains.
“After fixed costs, there’s not a lot left,” the official said. “The biggest challenge we had is how do we keep doing what we want to do in order to transform?”
Since senior defense officials chose not to seriously boost the Army’s bottom line from the outside, Army officials had to find savings and trade-offs from inside the Army budget.
The result is that 24 Army programs are scheduled for the chopping block in 2004, saving $1.6 billion. The most prominent cancellation is the Crusader artillery system, which Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered killed last year. Others include Abrams tank and Bradley fighting vehicle upgrades.
The total savings is about $1.6 billion, the official said.
Another 24 programs have been restructured, scaled back or slowed down, for a savings of about $600 million. Between killed and restructured programs, the Army found about $2.3 billion to apply to other areas, the official said.
Of those savings, $2.2 billion was transferred to programs that support the “Objective Force,” which is what service officials have dubbed the way they want the Army to look after 2010: more flexible, easily deployed, and technologically advanced.
Toward that end, the Army’s research and development budget is scheduled to go up by $1.6 billion, from $7.5 billion in 2003 to $9.1 billion in 2004.
Meanwhile, the showcase of the Objective Force, the Stryker wheeled combat vehicle, would receive $955 million in 2004 to purchase 310 Stryker vehicles. Of those, 287 vehicles would go to outfit the fourth brigade at Fort Polk (the first three brigades are now being fielded). Another $46 million is budgeted to continue development of other variations of the Stryker.
Another big-ticket program item on the Army side, the Comanche reconnaissance and light-attack helicopter, is set to receive all the money the Army had said it needed after restructuring and slowing down the troubled program last year: $1.1 billion.
The 2004 budget also includes $1.7 billion for the Army to keep developing the Future Combat System, which is a family of fighting vehicles the service says will act as the centerpiece of its modern fighting force. The budget funds the Army’s decision to make the FCS operational in 2010. Included in the FCS budget is $456 million to continue indirect fire systems that are now supposed to replace last year’s canceled Crusader artillery system.
Not being a military man myself I am not sure of the effects of some items outlined in this article - looking for freeper comment!
Lack of effective cheer leaders. If the leftists say they are protesting war because they don't want troops to get hurt then maybe they should be trying to get them more money - these people are not only risking their lives for our freedoms, they are giving up a portion of their lives to serve us. Not to say they, like all in the government, cannot spend more wisely - but I would rather send my tax dollars to our folks in uniform then to the idiotic programs liberals flaunt.
Last year the Rats were in control of the Senate. This year the adults are.
There is absolutely NO WAY that the Army spends $75,000 per soldier on "personnel costs" when their pay is crap, most of the housing was paid for long ago, BAS (food) allowance is just a couple hundred a month, and you can't count medical as an extra cost since they have their own hospitals.
Lately I've been corresponding with a number of former outstanding (i.e. rated in the top 10% of their peers) military officers who have left after 4 years for MBA programs. It's occured to me that the military actually does far too little to make life good for their NCOs (that's always been the case) but FAR TOO MUCH to make their junior and mid-level officers attractive to industry!
The most ridiculous thing the Army does is giving just about every mid-level officer the chance to take a year and half off to get a civilian masters degree.
HELLLOOO? Isn't it better to pay them to spend time with, oh I dunno, TROOPS? We waste years out of the useful life of every officer sending them to schooling with no application to military operations, which serves only to civilianize their resume and let headhunters lure them away with better-paying jobs. Good for those officers, but bad the Army!
The Army could save money by promoting most of it's officers from the top 30-40 percent of the NCO corps (not the top 10 percent, you don't want to waste good NCOs) and making it a WARRIOR LIFESTYLE. No more environmental awareness, applying Harvard Business School theory to leadership, or University of Phoenix finance classes in the evenings. The job description ought to be "kill people and break things," not all this namby pamby public administration crap. Being an officer or senior NCO is looking more and more like any run of the mill GS-07 to GS-15 civil servant job.
I swear I know friends who are going SWAT on municipal police departments and I envy many of them. They get far more action that you'd get in a lifetime of soldiering in the "New Army."
There was a day, you know, when cavalry soldiers would go ride on horses all the time!
Now cavalry soldiers have swapped Bradleys and Hummers for horses, but have also gone to B.S. schedules with B.S. training. Every person involved in mandating sexual harassment training in the military will have at least some of the blood of all future American casualties on their hands. The same goes with this consideration of others crap.
The real story is: you screw up, the sergeant yells at you. Keep screwing up, maybe he'll kick you in the butt with his boot. That's the way it's meant to be and it's not a violation of your "rights." Forcing sergeants to "counsel" people "sensitively" has forced the officers to become a bunch of nitpicking micromanagers -- and they stay that way their whole career which makes all the junior and mid-grade officers figure they should be the same way.
The only way to get around this is to make non-commissioned officers the new backbone of the officer corps. You will have grittier, tougher characters running the military that aren't as eager to kiss up to whichever federal executive or politician has a new stupid idea that will screw over the military. I think this is most important for the Army. The Marines seem to have less screwed up officers, from what I've seen this is due to a more practical training plan for newly commissioned Marines. The Corps currently gets 25% of its officers from the enlisted ranks...That figure could probably be doubled without gutting the NCO corps too badly, especially because there are few officers in the Marines. The Army would need to triple or quadruple the number of officers it gets from the NCO ranks...but I bet this would be a lot easier than having to continually bribe college students to serve!
I say this and I am an officer, from ROTC, who was NOT a former NCO! But I think (a) it would have made ME a better officer to be an NCO first; and (b) it would have filtered out a lot of the ninnies I've met and a lot of the stupid ideas non-prior service officers come up with. NCOs in general have less of a tendency to go through the motions and freak out about misplaced commas in op orders while focusing more on practical, battle-oriented training.
If the military wanted to make a leader of troops out of me, instead of paying me to sit around and read Shakespeare at Butthole State University for a couple years, they should have just put me in the ranks, maybe as a temporary NCO after a while, so I could actually see how it's done! Then I'd be much more valuable to the Army and less able/inclined to run off to the headhunter and find a cushy civilian job.
I know, I know - t'll never happen . . . but the fantasy is all that keeps me going!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.